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Quobuz subscription

Hi I've recently joined Quobuz to try-out few tracks. 

The ones released on 70's and 80's Japanese jazz vinyls sound really muffled. Thought they would sound better vs. YouTube streaming channel of Terminal Passage that actually mostly plays its digitized vinyl collection, but quality is too far away from even YouTube.

I checked the quality and all of them are CD 44.1kHz, but the sound quality is so far away from CD 44.1kHz.

So what's there to check? Is only major-popular recording industry albums sound good there.

I checked that via my Mytek DAC and via my cheap DAC and both DACs show nearly-same differences on the playback vs. YouTube.

So far Tidal actually gets my best grading on items outside of RR hall of fame or outside of recording industry standards.

It really seems to me that Quobuz is over-advertised.

 

czarivey
gphill's avatar
gphill
130 posts
 

I have both Tidal and Qobuz and both can sound great. I’m streaming them into my Rose 150b with a direct Ethernet cable into my router/modem. MQA on Tidal and hi rez on Qobuz both rival a really good recording on my turntable. I do have AT&T fiber internet with up to a thousand mps. I had a lot of drops until I changed my Ethernet cable,[defective cable].

gosta's avatar
gosta
839 posts
 

Well, the quality on Mr. Takanakas recordings seems to differ a lot. But nothing wrong with the bass intro on "Finger Dancing" through Tidal. Could have been Fagen :)

ghdprentice's avatar
ghdprentice
9,465 posts
 

Just listening to Seychelles on Qobuz… sounds very good. The volume is lower… not uncommon on recordings mastered to sound better, the don’t compress or compress as much. Turn up the volume. Much of classical will have a “lower volume”. 

 

I have done extensive testing of Qobuz vs Tidal… between sound quality and availability of high resolution music Qobuz wins hands down. They are both incredibly reliable. If you have trouble with them look at your streamer.

 

Dropouts on Tidal or Qobuz are almost a problem of the streamer… not the service. I listen hundreds of hours a year and maybe have drop outs once a year. A good streamer buffers you from the network. Services other than these two are much inferior.

12many
355 posts
 

Are you streaming from phone?  Or just using phone as controller?  

czarivey OP
5,946 posts
 

@12many,

I’m streaming via Lenovo IdeaCentre mini desk-top with W10 and SSD fed to MyTek 192 via USB 2.0

The rest of signal path can go to headphones or speakers, but that department is very sound

Seychelles does sound muffled. I tried volume up-down, but try to listen to same from YouTube Terminal Passage who ripped it from Japanese vinyl and then A/B

Try many other non-pop albums simply taken from an entire era of Japanese City-Funk stuff, German kroutrock such as Guru-Guru, Misus Beastly etc

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